


American Horror Story: Cult, Season 7, Episode 1, Election Night

by TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer



Category: American Horror Story: Cult
Genre: Analysis, Episode Review, Episode: s07e01 Election Night, Meta, Nonfiction, Season/Series 07, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-03 00:59:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16316102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer/pseuds/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer
Summary: Warning: Contains spoilers for the episode and the rest of season 7. Complete.





	American Horror Story: Cult, Season 7, Episode 1, Election Night

Let’s see if I can review a political season without going on any political rants.

Open to real life clips of Hillary Clinton and Inaugurated President Trump and other media clips surrounding the political climate at the time.

A title card announces it’s November 8, 2016 Election Night. Chameleon actor Evan Peters is playing blue-haired insane Kai Anderson.

Over at the house of Ally and Ivy Mayfair-Richards, talented actor Tim Kang is playing grumpy, cynical liberal Tom Chang.

Back to Kai, his insanity is established with the psychotic joy he expresses when the next President is announced. It’s not the fact he’s happy, it’s the fact he expresses this happiness by running around screaming his head off, and in a later scene, smearing his face with cheetos and literally humping a TV.

One complaint I have about this season is scenes are often either too chopped up or too long.

Meanwhile, Ally is established to have genuine mental health issues but not to the level of legitimate insanity.

Kai’s aforementioned insanity is shown, and back over to the liberal household, showing the first hints of their dysfunctional relationship, Ivy treats Ally more like a child than her wife, and what I presume is their nanny or a family friend is left to deal with their confused prepubescent son, Oz.

On another note, Oz often isn’t a realistic child, but Cooper Dodson does consistently great work for so one so young.

Tom fusses at his wife for not voting.

Obviously, I don’t know their backstory. Maybe they were once both apolitical/political, maybe her apoliticism is a new thing, maybe his politicalicism is a new thing, but generally, I’d advise people don’t marry someone if there are disagreements on the issue of whether to vote vs not to vote.

For people who do this anyway, maybe, don’t bring it up in someone else’s house. Especially, don’t bring it up if the people hosting you have kids, or else, said child(ren) might get upset.

Here Oz is scared his mothers will no longer be married, and they pull themselves together enough to comfort and reassure him.

Kai’s insanity is still being shown, and I didn’t realise how chopped up these scenes were until I started writing them out. At one point, he goes past the locked room containing his parents’ corpses and smells the rose on their door.

His younger sister, Winter, is shown talking on the phone, and she’s an over-the-top parody of a white feminist liberal stereotype. Coming in with his cheeto face, Kai pushes her buttons. Then, he extends his pinky, and linking hers to it, she admits to being scared.

“Everyone is,” he says.

This isn’t a lie on his part, but it’s true, either. There are a lot of reasons the American election turned out the way it did. People being afraid was one of those reasons, but not everyone was. Many people were upset, angry, and/or scared at the way it turned out, but not everyone who was unhappy was afraid.

After the credits, a comic book Oz is reading plays out.

Coming in, Ally insists he go to sleep instead of reading, and when he tries to hide what he was reading, she demands to see it. Thinking it might be something along the lines of a Playboy, she says a picture of a bare breast or erect penis never hurt anyone.

I don’t really understand parents like this.

I was allowed to stay up as late as I wanted as a kid. I was reading way above my grade level at a fairly young age, and what I watched was never monitored. I knew it wasn’t real, I knew I wasn’t to copy certain things characters did, and if something upset or scared me, I quickly got over it and learned to better avoid similar things in the future. If I saw bare breasts on TV, no one, least of all me, cared.

Yet, if I’d gotten my hands on something akin to Playboy or stumbled onto something actually pornographic, adult members of my family would have stepped in. I don’t think anyone would have gotten mad at me, but there definitely would have been an ‘only adults can look at such things’ type conversation.

Ally freaks out to the point of almost having a mental break upon seeing the clown character, and appearing, Ivy calms her down. She explains to Oz about how phobias are legitimate.

Yes, but when they put such an obvious strain on a family, something more needs to be done to make them more manageable.

Ivy’s parenting both her wife and their child. Oz is living in fear of setting one of his mothers off. It’s no wonder he’s closer to the one who isn’t constantly making him second guess his actions for fear of her becoming a crying, screaming mess. On the surface, Ivy does what a parent should and makes him feel safe and secure. He knows, even if he does something wrong, she’ll react relatively reasonably to it.

Once they get Oz settled in bed, Ally apologises for how her phobias are starting to affect Oz, and Ivy plays being supportive.

The next scene has Tom in a city council meeting. I’m not sure if he’s a judge, city council member, volunteer, or some other type of elected official.

Kai comes up to speak, and I approve of the blue tie matching his neatly tied back hair. I don’t approve of his anti-Semitism.

Interestingly, before he started calling for blowing up a Jewish temple, he did make some fair points: Namely, sometimes, freedom and independence is unduly curbed in an effort to keep people, especially children, safe.

To defend his horrible position, he makes the correct observation using fear to beget infantilisation is something both certain parents and politicians do.

Yes, but as the meme goes, 1984 was intended as a warning, not a how-to guide.

I’m kind of wondering if the tired, unimpressed, I’m-so-done expression Tom has in this scene is purely the character. I don’t know what any of Tim Kang’s political opinions are, but I imagine he has been exposed to significant amounts of both overt and covert racism in his life.

Tom has an awesome moment where he uses Kai’s own words to embarrass Kai, gives him a verbal smackdown, and then, indifferently dismisses him. Also, he uses the term, “Papa Bear Trump.”

Starting to leave, Kai declares, “There’s nothing more dangerous in this world than a humiliated man.”

Over to Ally, she’s talking to red herring therapist, Rudy Vincent. It’s revealed she had or came close to having a nervous breakdown after 9/11, but meeting Ivy helped her. She wanted to be strong and healthy enough to be in a relationship and be the sort of partner Ivy needed/wanted, and seeking help, she applied herself to getting better.

If not for how dysfunctional the relationship ended up being, this would be sweet.

Then, President Obama was elected, and she finally felt truly safe and secure.

To an extent, I can understand how a person might feel more hopeful if a politician they believe will make the world a better place is elected, but the degree of importance Ally attached to President Obama winning is odd.

For all Rudy’s a red herring, unlike most TV therapists, he doesn’t annoy me in this scene. He suggests Ally cut out most of her social media. A person doesn’t need to know about all the crazy stuff that they can’t do anything about happening in the world.

I agree with this. I’m all for people staying informed in order to continue trying to help change the world, but there’s a line between that and overwhelming oneself with constant updates of every single bad news item out there. There’s a difference between trying to make changes and dedicating one’s life solely to fixing all the world’s problems.

He prescribes her a mild anti-anxiety medication, and she protests she doesn’t like taking drugs.

“And I don’t like prescribing them, but you need them.” He continues, many people are uneasy with the state of affairs, but her reactions are extreme. If she doesn’t do something, this will effect her child and marriage.

The next scene has her going to a store. She meets one-armed cashier Gary Longstreet, and it’s revealed he’s a Trump supporter.

Instead of getting into an argument, she extracts herself from the conversation.

Then, clowns terrorise her. Two of them are having sex, and I’m pretty sure this is Harrison and Samuels.

I don’t know what this says about me, but clowns have never scared me, and I have a high tolerance for loud noises. Until the knife came out, if I were in this situation, I would definitely be uneasy, but I’m fairly confident I wouldn’t be terrified. If I just straight up saw two people having sex in a store, I’d probably be trying to find a manager and/or calling the police, but unless they acted sexually aggressive towards me, I wouldn’t be scared.

Once the knife comes out, however, I completely understand her terror.

Getting out to her car, she fails to check it before entering. She calls Ivy in an absolute panic, and of course, a clown is in the backseat.

She ends up crashing the car.

Later, there’s a tiny second of Samuels silently leaving the house, and Ivy and Ally talk about what happened. Basically, Gary is claiming Ally was running around throwing wine bottles willy-nilly.

Again, Ivy plays supportive, and then, when Oz comes out, she leads him back to bed.

The next scene, it’s day, and Ivy and Ally are at the restaurant they own. Ivy is frustrated Ally isn’t doing her part. Ally’s the “open, lovely, beautiful face”, and Ivy is a chef. She’s been cooking, but business isn’t doing so well without the face around to entice people in and make them feel welcome.

Then, Ivy brings up the lack of sex they’ve been having, and this is a particularly horrible bit of gaslighting considering a flashback in a later episode will show Ivy was the one who originally started showing a clear disinterest in them having sex.

Ally immediately jumps to this being a threat of Ivy leaving, and Allison Pill does great here. Ivy comes across as a woman torn between frustration and trying to handle this frustration the right way. Ally has issues, and she wants to help, but at the same time, there’s only so much she can do and take before it gets to be too much. It’s not fair to expect Ally to just get over things, but some of what she’s going through due to Ally’s issues isn’t fair, either.

“Isn’t this more important than some stupid election?”

If Pill knew the twist of Ivy being a cultist, there aren’t any solid clues in this episode.

Ally promises she’s going to focus both on getting better and their family, and Ivy suggests they need a new nanny for Oz.

Next, they go outside, and they’re a normal-ish couple for a few minutes before the fact Ally voted for Jill Stein and that Ivy is not happy about this comes up.

Then, Kai attacks them with a latte.

Later, Winter shows up for the nanny position. She’s a combination of creepy, kooky, and outright rude, and Ally isn’t sure about her. Ivy, however, is onboard.

Intercut with this is a flashback to Kai and Winter pinky-locking, and it’s established there’s to be no lying whilst the pinkies are locked and all questions by Kai must be answered.

Except, most of these things, I’d kind of expect Kai to have already found out. He and Winter were close when they younger, and once they got a little older, he was a manipulative, chaos-causing tornado of insanity before the election.

Winter is bisexual, she was targeted for liking someone female when she was in fifth grade, and she had anal sex with a man at some point in the past. I’m not surprised the last one hasn’t come out until now, and maybe, the second isn’t much of a stretch, but I really would have thought, given their respective personalities and closeness, he’d know about her bisexuality at this point.

His asks her who she wants dead, and crying, she insists she’s never wanted anyone dead. He yells his disbelief at her.

In the present, she’s hired, and in the past, she admits he’s what scares her the most.

During the night, using racism to taunt Mexican labourers, Kai also throws a pee-filled condom at them, and they physically attack him.

It’s shown someone is filming this.

Over at the restaurant, Ivy has poured some wine. She goes to get some food for Ally to try.

Meanwhile, Winter is acting inappropriately towards Oz in both word and deed. On the deed end, she shows him a dark web website.

With Ally, she’s aggravated about all the tweeting, and the simple solution would be to stop following/reading the tweets. She has a possible hallucination involving her food, and a clown is shown masturbating nearby.

Then, however, there’s no one but her and Ivy, and the food’s normal. Ivy wants her to take the medication prescribed, and Ally expresses her fear she’s going insane.

Over at the house, Oz has had enough of the website, but Winter convinces him it’s akin to a vaccination for the brain. She leaves him alone, and hearing music, he looks outside to see a clowns exiting an ice-cream van. They all stare at him, and he scrambles away from the window.

In the car, Ally declares she’s taken the pill. Ivy still isn’t appeased, and when Ally brings up not liking the idea of alerting her body chemistry via controlled substances, Ivy counters Ally is big on wine.

They get to the neighbourhood, and there’s sirens and police tape. After a panic-filled moment, they find Oz, and it’s revealed the Changs are dead.

Oz tries to tell them about the clowns, and it’s revealed via flashback that Winter took him to the house and had him watch the murders happen from a window.

In the present, Winter’s like, ‘Not calling your kid a liar, but I think this is his overactive imagination in play.’

Ivy backs this up by suggesting this was one of Oz’s night terrors.

She tries to talk to Samuels, and Haynes does great in this role. On Teen Wolf, his character was supposed to be sympathetic despite his often jerkish behaviour, but the fact I couldn’t really identify with Jackson’s issues in combination with the fact Haynes was so good at playing the jerk made it so that the moments where his character was supposed to come across as sympathetic often fell flat with me.

Here, his character is supposed to be unsympathetic. Even now, his character is mildly alienating without revealing his villain status. Later on, there are some cute but not particularly deep movements between him and Harrison, and the one time he’s meant to be somewhat sympathetic, he completely sells it.

After trying to get out of answering their questions, he says it was a murder-suicide.

The ending scene is a shot through house followed by Ally waking up to find a clown on Ivy’s side of the bed.

Fin.


End file.
